Friends of Lackawanna on Tuesday celebrated Throop Borough Council’s decision to oppose Keystone Sanitary Landfill’s nearly 45-year expansion plan, while landfill officials didn’t expect it to make a major impact on the state’s review of the proposal.
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Tom Cummings allowed himself a long winter’s nap on Christmas Day. On Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and his birthday, he was back burning the midnight oil, toiling on the $195 million sale of the Scranton Sewer Authority.
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PITTSTON — The marble statue of Christopher Columbus, damaged by an out-of-control car in December, returned to Pittston’s intersection of Kennedy Boulevard and South Main Street after a months-long restoration effort.
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The city swimming pools at Weston Field, above; Connell Park and Weston Park will close Saturday to end the 2017 summer swim seasons at those facilities, recreation official Tom Lynch said.
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Editor: In a recent speech at Marywood University, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Richard Bloomingdale advocated for a state minimum wage increase because we live in a "demand-based economy," where people need to make enough to buy goods and services and drive commerce.

In surmising that a mandated minimum wage increase will create economic prosperity, Mr. Bloomingdale doesn't take into account that the majority of employers who pay increased wages would be small-business owners, who earn an average annual income of $50,000.

This would have an immediate negative impact on small-business owners' ability to create good-paying jobs. It happened in 2008, when the minimum wage was raised from $5.15 per hour to $7.15 per hour. Our organization heard from numerous small businesses that were forced to freeze hiring, reduce hours, raise prices and even lay off employees as a result of the increase. Their hardships were chronicled in newspapers statewide, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, two papers that editorialized in favor of a higher minimum wage, and that wrote about the adverse impact the hike had on youth employment programs in the city.

Placing another costly mandate on employers at a time of tremendous uncertainty with regard to the economy and the pending implementation of the federal health care law is not doing what is best for working families.

The minimum wage is designed to be an entry-level wage, and the market should create competition for quality workers to drive wages, rather than institute a government mandate that has no regard for a business's ability to pay.

Workers should have opportunities to gain success and grow their income, but prosperity cannot simply be mandated.

GENE BARR

PRESIDENT AND CEO,

PA CHAMBER OF BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY

Unworthy focus

Editor: I was truly dismayed to see an Oct. 20 picture in The Times-Tribune showing the Century Club of Scranton celebrating Mrs. Robert E. Lee, the wife of the Confederate general.

My husband's family had three young men die to preserve the Union and to take a stand against slavery in the Civil War.

So, I found it particularly offensive that in this time of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, a Pennsylvania club would choose to honor a woman who was a slave owner and an unrepentant Confederate until the day she died.

I find it as distressing as recent attempts to whitewash Confederate history as something less than treasonous and oppressive of our fellow human beings.

If the club wanted to promote a spirit of reconciliation and civility, it would have been far better to honor the remarkable post-war friendship that developed between Mrs. Jefferson Davis, who reconciled with the Union after her husband died, and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, in Newport, R.I.

That is something truly worth celebrating.

BARBARA STRANGFELD

CLARKS SUMMIT

Doesn't equate

Editor: Regarding the Oct. 22 political cartoon:

Could you please explain how this attempt to paint the tea party as racist squares with its strong support for a former pizza executive who ran for president and is black?

E. H. WILLIAMS

HOP BOTTOM,

SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY

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